I bought Bruce Springsteen’s “The River” when I was 17, and I played it until I had memorized every song. Mr. Jones, my English teacher, had turned me on to The Boss sensing perhaps that the lyrics – the poetry – would appeal to my blue-collar sensibilities. I had never seen a Cadillac or a State Trooper, and I didn’t know the difference between a highway and the motorway, but I knew drizzling rain and disappointment. I knew the dole, and I knew diminished opportunity. I knew pregnant girls whose boyfriends married them. I knew men who worked at the factory, and then the factory stopped working. I knew life in a small town in a small country on the other side of the Atlantic, and I knew people were leaving that life and that I would too. Looking back thirty-five years, I don’t know if all this occurred to me much at the time – I was 17, and mostly, I had Friday on my mind – Out in the Street.

As Bruce Springsteen revisited “The River” last Thursday night in Phoenix, Arizona, I rewound the tapes. Flashes of my 17 year old self surfaced, a little tougher, and wiser maybe, thanks to all the beginnings and endings, the marriage, the mortgage, the raising of a good person, the career, the cancer, the death of the man who had for many years quickened my heart, the worry about what might come next and the waiting – always the waiting – for the other shoe to drop. In the middle of my life, I am realizing my parents – the people I fought so hard at 17 – were once in the middle of theirs with beautiful dreams that were dashed like some of mine. I know now the darkness that got the best of us . . .

Papa now I know the things you wanted that you could not say . . . I swear I never meant to take those things away

Unloading every song, I wonder did Bruce Springsteen know how well he was telling the stories that made up Ken’s life? There was the one about not being drafted to Vietnam because he was the only surviving son of a man who died in military service, and then the one about how he cut his hair when all his buddies didn’t come back. There was the one about trading in his beloved motorcycle and the muscle car and settling down when he and his girl were just too young. Settling. On they went, for 27 odd years, each of them making compromises and taking care of what became obligations.

Then the flash of courage one Saturday afternoon as he stood with me in a parking lot outside a place that I imagine is a bit like Frankie’s Joint. He showed his cards. All of them. And, in the space of a heartbeat, he turned from that life because the alternative was like “dying by inches,” and he followed instead a heart beating wildly.

That man of mine brought with him only the shirt on his back and a Ford Thunderbird. Young then, he had the heart – and he had the stomach – for all of it. All of it. All in, he would drive all night just to buy me some shoes.

For as long as we could be young, we had a great run. We raised the kind of hell that belongs in a rollicking Springsteen song, but the truth is that it lost much of the shine before he died and we may not have made it, because the “in sickness” part of the deal sucked.

We were married for one day shy of 22 years, and together we did something good – really good. He was in my corner – always – and any regrets are so tiny now that they just don’t matter. The lesson? Well, it’s about time. It is always about time. We have only so much – not enough to waste – to learn how to live and to live well with another person, a partner.

Going back to The River with Springsteen after 35 years, I found myself believing that another opportunity to live and love better – to do something good – is just up the road. We’ll see . . .

The River is how you learn the adult life and you choose your partner and you choose your work and that clock starts ticking and you walk alongside not only the people you’ve chosen to live your life with but you walk alongside of your own mortality and you realize you have a limited amount of time to raise your family, to do your job, to try and do something good. That’s ‘The River.’

I always thought Robert Frost was very sensible to ask so plainly in a poem we had to memorize for school, why it is that good fences make good neighbors:

Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down.

If walls could talk, what stories would they tell? I never pondered this more than in 1978 when I traveled with the North East Ulster Schools Symphony Orchestra to Germany for our annual summer trip. Ordinarily, we spent a week in Ballycastle, County Antrim, that culminated with a concert for our parents, but this July would be my first away from Northern Ireland, from one bitterly divided place to another, the latter split in two by the Berlin Wall.

I knew only a little about Nikita Khruschev’s wall. I knew it had been built two years before I was born. As I grew up, I came to understand it as a symbol for the “Iron Curtain” that had divided Eastern and Western Europe since 1945. And then in the summer of 1978, I was standing in front of that symbol, its graffitied messages preaching to the choir.

I remember Stephen, one of the lads in the woodwind section, urinated on the Berlin wall, offending, as he did, some passersby who perhaps did not understand that the wall was infinitely more offensive with its barbed wire and watchtowers and its armed guards with their shoot-to-kill orders. In retrospect, I wish there had been more like him, outraged and outspoken.

We were curious and a little scared, I suspect, when we took a trip beyond the curtain and into East Berlin. We were given strict instructions not to photograph any bridges or buildings, and a young tour-guide was assigned to us. Although we were all from Northern Ireland – except the conductor and his son, who were English – most of the Catholics among us had Irish passports whereas the Protestants carried the British counterpart. This caused some delay and confusion at Checkpoint Charlie where I acquired the first stamp in my very first passport, documenting forever the borders that bear down on us, closing in on us, constricting rather than expanding our vision of what our world could be like . . .

On the other side, I remember staring out the window of an old bus at an austere city, its sad grayness a stark contrast to the bright and bustling Kurfürstendamm Avenue – Ku’damm – on the West side, where fancy restaurants, bijou boutiques, and world-class museums made it too easy to be oblivious to the wanting on the other side of that wall. Although we knew her for only the shortest time, I remember crying for the young woman who had served as our tour guide, understanding in full that she would not be able to join us in West Berlin, to hear us perform Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto in E Minor for a radio program. I don’t suppose a group of youngsters from Northern Ireland schools made much of an impact in 1978, but a decade later, Bruce Springsteenpaid a zAvisit to East Berlin, telling a crowd that had never experienced anything quite like him – a wrecking balleven then, that he was there to rage against the injustices built up in that wall:

I’m not here for or against any government. I’ve come to play rock ’n’ roll for you in the hope that one day all the barriers will be torn down.

I like to think it was The Boss rather than Ronald Reagan who urged Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down that walland that somewhere in that crowd, was the teenage bassoonist who had relieved himself against the Berlin Wall ten years earlier.

Watching on television when the wall came down was one of the greatest events of my personal history. I remember hoping that our young tour-guide had been reunited with family and friends in the West. Photographer Kai Wiedenhöfer documented it, believing that the fall of the Berlin Wall would end forever the notion that a wall is the answer to some of the most complex issues of our time. But from 1989 until 2013, he photographed what he described as a “renaissance of walls,” that includes the Peace Lines in my beloved Belfast, Northern Ireland, the West Bank fence that separates Israel and Palestine, the Demilitarized Zone between North and South Korea, and the border between Mexico and the United States.

In fact, since the Berlin Wall came down, 28 new border walls have gone up all around the world. Ironically, these walls that are going up at such an alarming rate reflect not totalitarian regimes intent on keeping their people form seeking freedom and opportunities beyond their borders; rather, democracies such as these very United States, intent on keeping such people out.

From July until November, 2013, Wiedenhöfer’s Wall on Wall exhibition featured 36 giant panoramas of modern man-made barriers glued on the longest remaining stretch of the Berlin Wall. Perhaps the installation helped spark a conversation about why so many of the walls between us today are taller, longer, and stronger than any we could have imagined on that jubilant November day in 1989 when echoes of Kennedy’s visit to Berlin in 1963 rang out: “Ich bin ein Berliner.”

Perhaps it played a part in the story I saw splashed across the front page of the Belfast Telegraph this weekend, that the walls have been coming down, thanks to negotiations that did not make the front pages. In the past two years, six of the walls have been removed, and more are slated to come down.

Peace comes dropping slow.

The walls of the “Peace Line” started going up in 1969, intended to keep apart Belfast’s two divided communities. While these walls were erected only as a temporary measure, many have been standing for over four decades. That’s the thing about a wall – once it goes up, it seems to take a very long time to come down. It becomes a part of our external and internal geography, at once keeping us apart and a part.

When I think of the 4th of July, I think not of fireworks that flash and fly across an American night, but of those that kiss the sky over Slane Castle in County Meath Ireland, after a long day of music.

My first concert at Slane was in 1982 for The Rolling Stones “farewell tour.” Seriously. Warming up for them were the J. Geils Band, The Chieftains, and George Thorogood and the Destroyers. Two years later, I was back, to see UB40, Santana, and Bob Dylan and the sweet surprise of Van Morrison joining Dylan on stage to sing “Tupelo Honey.” As I recall, Bono showed up as well.

But on June 1, 1985, America came to Ireland when Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band made their Irish debut. The previous summer, I was in the United States, when the Born in the USA tour was in full swing and was lucky to have been upstate New York at the same time as Springsteen. I saw him perform at Saratoga Springs and again in September, when a trip to Niagara Falls with an American cousin also included a Springsteen show in Buffalo.

I knew Ireland was in for a treat, and when tickets went on sale, I also bought one for my little brother – it was his first concert. A seminal moment in his musical education.

Imagine for a moment, close to 100,000 of us making a pilgrimage through the sleepy – and disapproving – village of Slane to see The Boss. Between assurances of increased security and a promise – as yet unfulfilled – that this would be the last rock concert to disturb them, the residents had been placated. Even the weather cooperated with the kind of sun-drenched day we Irish pray for. Some said it was the hottest day on record in Ireland. Everybody was young, even the weather-beaten old farmers who let us park on their fields. When the band burst on stage with a thunderous “Born in the USA,” everybody was Irish, even Bruce. When he turned his baseball cap backwards and bragged, “I had a grandmother from here,” the crowd erupted.

Although we basked in his pride, the reality was that our weather was rarely that sunny, and thousands of us would be forced out of Ireland as economic immigrants, collectively the “brain drain” of the 1980s. Across the water, Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister; farther afield, the Berlin wall was still standing; and, in Ireland, divorce was still illegal and condoms had barely become available without a prescription.

But on that glorious day, in spite of the economic and political truths of Ireland, and the ever-diminishing possibilities before us, a defiant Springsteen held us aloft, and we believed in America.

While I have lost count of the Springsteen concerts I’ve attended, I have always been able to count on him to stand up for people like me, for immigrants who are seeking America. Sometimes it seems as though the very idea of America is unraveling, especially in Arizona. I remember last summer, waiting to see what would happen to the Immigration Bill and a last-minute amendment that would increase border controls that included unmanned drones. Unmanned drones.

And then last week, I read in the Arizona Republic that our State Superintendent of Instruction, John Huppenthal, the person charged with overseeing the education of our children, many of whom – like mine – are the children of immigrants, wrote this in 2010 before he was elected: “We all need to stomp out balkanization. No spanish radio stations, no spanish billboards, no spanish tv stations, no spanish newspapers. This is America, speak English.” He goes on to say that Mexican food is OK, as long as the menus are “mostly in English.” He also described as “lazy pigs” people who receive public assistance and even compared the work of Susan Sanger to acts committed by the Nazis. Mind you, this was all written anonymously, posting comments on a blog, hiding behind the username Falcon9.

Huppenthal has since “renounced and repudiated” his remarks; however, he will neither resign nor bring his re-election campaign to an end. He cried. He’s sorry. I’m sorry, too. I’m sorry he was placed in charge of the schools we send our children to every day. I’m sorry we don’t have an educator at the helm of the Arizona Department of Education – a good one – someone who takes seriously the notion of “in loco parentis,” someone driven not by hubris but by humanity.

Bruce Springsteen once told a reporter that he wasn’t cut out for the traditional school system:

I wasn’t quite suited for the educational system. One problem with the way the educational system is set up is that it only recognizes a certain type of intelligence, and it’s incredibly restrictive — very, very restrictive. There’s so many types of intelligence, and people who would be at their best outside of that structure get lost.

The Boss is on to something, but we know that Bruce Springsteen will never be the Superintendent of Instruction in Arizona. For now, that position belongs to John Huppenthal, who vilified immigrant families and the working poor behind his anonymous pseudonyms.

There are 11 million undocumented immigrants who are already in these United States, trapped within a terribly broken immigration system. Of that number, many are children, here through no fault of their own, and America is the only country they have ever known. They pledge allegiance to her flag every day. They wait, their spirit intact even in the face of one devastating disappointment after another.

In A Nation of Immigrants, John F. Kennedy writes that “Immigration policy should be generous; it should be fair; it should be flexible. With such a policy we can turn to the world, and to our own past, with clean hands and a clear conscience.” Half a century later, such a policy remains elusive.

Tomorrow, as we celebrate America’s birthday, how do we hold up our immigrant children? Not with the anonymous online ranting of someone who would be elected to run their schools, but with Bruce Springsteen’s proud and public celebration of the undaunted immigrant spirit:

I am proud to be here today as another hopeful wanderer, a son of Italy, of Ireland and of Holland and to wish God’s grace, safe passage and good fortune to those who are crossing our borders today and to give thanks to those who have come before whose journey, courage and sacrifice made me an American.

Meta

Immigration matters

From there to here . . .

Yvonne hails from Antrim, Northern Ireland, and has lived in the desert southwest of the United States for almost thirty years. Married, with a daughter who is navigating her path through the "teen tunnel," and a haughty cat, Atticus, she has spent the better part of the last three decades in the classroom as a student, teacher, and administrator. Her mid-life crisis came as a sneaky Stage II invasive breast cancer diagnosis which subsequently sent her to the blogosphere where she found a virtual home away from home . . .